Neutron stars – a melting pot for atomic nuclei
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| Number of Parts | 163 | |
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| License | CC Attribution - NoDerivatives 4.0 International: You are free to use, copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
| Identifiers | 10.5446/50388 (DOI) | |
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00:00
AuftauenGesundheitsstörungTitanateBlock (periodic table)Atomic numberWine tasting descriptors
00:17
GesundheitsstörungChemical experimentMeeting/Interview
00:25
ExplosionChemical experiment
00:28
DensityIronSugar
00:54
AtomPressureThermoformingAtomic numberDrawing
01:16
ThermoformingWaterChemical experiment
01:21
WaterIceMeeting/Interview
01:24
IceSea levelHuman body temperatureSystemic therapyWaterÜbergangszustandMeeting/Interview
01:30
Chemical experiment
01:35
Human body temperatureSea levelSystemic therapyMeeting/Interview
01:42
Critical point (thermodynamics)Human body temperatureCollisionSchwermetallPressureGasÜbergangszustandMeeting/Interview
02:24
ÖlNanoparticleSpectrometer
02:31
Tin foil
02:36
SpectrometerNanoparticleMeeting/Interview
02:41
IceRiver sourceWalkingNanoparticleSchwermetall
03:01
CollisionSchwermetallMeeting/Interview
03:09
SchwermetallCollision
03:20
AreaCombine harvester
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Computer animation
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Computer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:06
Among the most unusual and fascinating of all heavenly bodies are neutron stars. They are supposed to consist of an exotic soup of atomic building blocks, a quark-gluon plasma. To understand this phenomenon, the physicist Tetiana Galatyuk at the GSI
00:23
creates conditions in the laboratory similar to those found in neutron stars. So the neutron star is an object which survives after the supernova explosion. And here is just an example of how this neutron star could look like. As the name says already, neutron star is an object which exists from neutrons.
00:45
And these neutrons, they pack together such that the densities which one can achieve in these neutron stars are extremely high. There, a cube of iron with edges of 500 meters in length would shrink to the size of a sugar cube.
01:02
Under such a tremendous pressure, the atoms simply break up and form a soup which physicists call a quark-gluon plasma. Tetiana Galatyuk and her team are interested in the phase transition to this exotic material. The principle of a phase transition is familiar to us from everyday experience.
01:21
We have a water which can exist in the form of ice, water and also vapor. Transition between the ice to water and between the water to vapor happens only if we change the parameters of our system. In our case, we just bring a little bit more of the heating to our system.
01:41
And then at some point when the temperature inside the spot is on the level of 100 degrees, and this is what we call the critical point, at this stage we go from the liquid to the vapor phase transition, or as we also try to understand and find out this in the nuclear physics would be the transition from the hadron gas to the quark-gluon plasma phase.
02:11
But at what temperature and pressure? To work this out, researchers collect signals coming from the hot dense fireball of a heavy ion collision.
02:20
They collect the data using a detector that shares its name with the Greek god of the underworld, Hades. To start with, heavy ions are accelerated up to 90% of the speed of light with the help of the particle accelerator at the GSI and are fired at the target foils. The dielectron spectrometer Hades then measures the generated particles.
02:44
All these particles, they are flying in the detector, and after reconstructing all the particles which are produced in this heavy ion collision, we can make a step back and to really try to understand and to identify the new states of matter, if they are existing.
03:01
Hades will be connected ahead of the compressed baryonic matter experiment, which is being built in the framework of the large new particle accelerator facility, FAIR. This will enable greater intensities during the acceleration and collision of heavy ions to be reached. A large number of ions increase the chances that rare events can be observed.
03:21
The particles, with better precision, we also need the better detectors. And that's something which later on we could do with the compressed baryonic matter experiment, which would combine many detector components, and each of these detector components is basically state of the art of detector technology.
03:42
An exotic research area? By no means. Tetiana Galapljuk is one of many hundreds of scientists worldwide who are preparing the compressed baryonic matter experiments.